Independence
by LGold
Summary: It started when she pulled herself from a soil-dampened coffin.


In the beginning, there was darkened room after darkened room. It started when she pulled herself from a soil-dampened coffin, and only got more boring from there. Still, though Willow had always been used to the light and warmth of the sun, a little intuition told her that seeking them out now wouldn't be a good career move.

Willow's memories of her life had started fading almost as soon as she had left it, but she remembered her last night breathing as clearly as she could hear her heart not beating. It was a crisp autumn evening, or as close to autumn as you got in California's personal hell. The night she died. The last night that Sunnydale's human population slept peacefully.

Xander, dumb then, dumber than ever now that he was dead, took her down to the graveyard that night. A younger Willow with more innocence and more naïveté (not to mention vital signs) had tried to twist the situation in her head to something approaching a date-like scenario. It had worked before: sitting with Xander by that old tree at lunchtimes, helping Xander with history homework, even watching Xander girl-spot at the Bronze; they were all dates in Willow's mind, if not in actuality. Not that night, though. That night, Willow and Xander were walking together through a graveyard, and they were looking for an absent friend.

Jesse had been missing for two days; not a very long time by Sunnydale standards, but long enough that his friends were getting worried. Long enough to instigate trips all over Sunnydale that day, a small enough town that there were only a few patches of land left to check by the time night fell – places that they had studiously avoided the whole day. Graveyards. Maybe that was foolish, seeing as they were always going to have to check the graveyards at some point, and leaving it until night-time was just… or maybe it was wishful thinking, growing less reasoned as the day wore on, that they would find Jesse before resorting to the cemeteries, that there would be no need to so much as set foot in them. They hadn't found him, and it was Friendship and Loyalty and many other great human qualities that pulled Xander and Willow into Sunnydale's cemeteries that night.

They found Jesse that night, but they were too late, too late.

He was sitting on a gravestone when they first spotted him. The white marble was the same colour as his skin, and he sat statue-still; Willow thought, at first, that he was one of the stone angels guarding those graves. She was mistaken. Jesse was no angel now, stone or otherwise, although he was just as dead.

Standing as they approached, Jesse looked just as he had always done – hair a little messy, clothes a little rumpled, clearly hadn't looked in a mirror for days. He was a little pale, but the autumn moon cast them all in the same tone, and when he and Xander hugged in greeting, Xander's slight collapse was just relief at seeing his buddy again.

When Xander fell to the ground, and Willow could see the black blood washing the side of his neck and the lower half of Jesse's face, and the white fangs shining in Jesse's boyish grin, she screamed and began to run but, once again, Willow was too late.

And now she was like Jesse.

Just like him, in fact.

Rumpled, soil-stained clothes.

Dead white skin.

Hidden fangs.

Vampire.

She supposed that it would have been hard to believe, if she hadn't just died and woken up in a coffin. Jesse was waiting, standing six feet above her, with a newly-risen Xander and news of the Master's ascension in a Californian surfer-boy accent.

And he took Willow to a house (1630 Revello Drive. It was empty; there were far less humans around than Willow remembered, although memories from before the grave can sometimes be misleading) and he led her to the basement and he locked her in.

Oh, sure. So the boys can go off and have fun, but Willow gets stuck in a basement. Might as well be alive, except if she was alive, in this town, on this night, she'd be dead by now. Huh.

But that didn't change the sheer boredom of it. What's a girl to do all day? Oh, Jesse or Xander would come back occasionally, bubbling with un-life, maybe bringing her a rat or two; they acted like jocks now that they had a little power in the world, and had realised that they could use that power to keep little ol' Willow firmly in the basement.

Willow was nothing if not smart, however. When they first came down and hooked their arms around hers, giggling to each other over her head, and dragged her up the steps and out into the street, she stayed quiet, and pretended to be awed, and watched. There were people everywhere, that night, but Willow could tell that they weren't quite people in the normal sense of living and breathing. Oh, there was the odd human, strolling all unaware through the vampire horde, but for the most part the sound of beating hearts was conspicuously absent. And she could hear hearts, now. How odd.

It looked like an interesting world.

The second time out, she ran away. She lasted four nights, hunting rats and cats in the alleys, evading older, more experienced vampires, before returning to 1630 Revello Drive in exhaustion. She acted repentant, she promised innocently to make it up to Jesse and Xander, but inside, there was glee. She didn't quite dance in the darkness of the basement, once they finally left her alone and ascended the stairs with more frat-boy nudging. Willow Rosenberg Dances Like A Spaz, even if she is a creature of the night. She did smile, though. Evilly.

They kept her inside for a month that time, and paid her visits most days, but a month isn't a long time for a vampire who knows that she's going to live forever. She almost enjoyed the waiting, at times. Not once, not even when the floor got really hard and the vampire-senses-enhanced sound of bugs scuttling in the walls got really annoying, did she miss humanity.

By the fifth time out, she had killed humans and savoured their blood. She had raced down a main road at midnight, ignoring cars both parked and driving. She knew that she could have run away properly, but the Master still ruled over Sunnydale, and Willow hadn't yet met him. She was intrigued.

So she casually suggested a visit, and Jesse and Xander took her to the Bronze arm in arm. Willow permitted a smile to flicker like a snake over her face as they approached the Master's private backroom, which he kept as if he were a client having a party in that long-ago time when humans danced in Sunnydale. It wasn't just a backroom, now. It was his throne room.

The door opened ahead of them, and Xander and Jesse, sniggering, stepped through ahead of Willow to usher her in. Smiling, she entered the door, and, looking directly at the Master, reclined in his chair at the other end of the room, she kicked to one side and elbowed to the other with vampiric speed and strength. Willow didn't have to glance back to see her sire and her best friend groaning on the ground behind her as she sashayed onwards towards the Master. He looked on with something approaching approval, and definite interest. A month in a basement was one thing; the Master had spent centuries underground. Willow intended to liven things up, and she didn't need any help.


End file.
